Feminist Friday: It’s Beyoncé’s Internet. We Just Visit It.

Oh, remember how certain Texas lawmakers totes assured everyone that Texas women would be perfectly well cared for even without Planned Parenthood? Yeah, not so much. Among other wall-punch-inducing stats in that article, wellness exams dropped by 23%.

Once people recovered from the sheer wonderful audacity of Beyoncé freaking owning the holiday season with a surprise album (and videos, and a series of mystery novels, and chainsaw sculptures, and whatever the hell else she wants to do because she is Beyoncé), we got around to talking about “Pretty Hurts” and Beyoncé’s feminism and Beyoncé kicking down the walls of other people’s definitions of feminism and then the Internet started arguing if Beyoncé was allowed to call herself a feminist or if she is the right kind of feminist and that, to be honest, is where I checked out of the conversation. Because maybe we can do less arguing about whether an obvious powerhouse is doing it wrong and more kicking down of walls in our own way.

This Week in Ugh

L.A. Weekly will piss you right the hell off at Saving Mr. Banks, which scrubs away Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers’s bisexuality (and a hell of a lot of other things that were interesting about her) in favor of creating a prissy straw-woman character for the much wiser Walt Disney character to charm. I know we all need fluff sometimes, but doesn’t the other movie that could have been, the one with two smart, eccentric, opposed visionaries sound more fun?

And the U.K.’s Let Toys Be Toys campaign is making some real headway with getting retailers to cool it with the gender-segregated marketing. Marks & Spencer is the latest store to pledge to introduce gender-neutral toys in 2014, joining Boots, Debenhams, Toys R Us and others. (Hey, Toys R Us U.S.—you think you could let any of that smart thinking make its way over here? Because we want to play with all the toys.)

The Village Voice made me take a hard look at my iPod this week when it reminded us of the [trigger warning] deeply upsetting charges against R. Kelly. And, more to the point, the way that we have collectively managed to ignore them and think of Kelly as that guy who writes the hilarious lyrics over terrific jams instead of as a serial rapist of very young teenage girls. Even one of the headlines from when the charges first came out refers to “sex with” teenage girls, as though that is a mildly scandalous thing instead of a coercive situation after which more than one victim tried to commit suicide.

The way our culture deals with young women—and particularly young black women—as disposable commodities or as willing sex kittens who seduced that vulnerable older man puts new young women in danger every day. But we routinely treat their physical safety as less important than “Ignition (Remix)” or “Trapped in the Closet” or whatever Roman Polanski is cooking up in his so-called exile at a beautiful European villa. (Thanks to my friend Jamil for the link.)

Meet the Guardian Princesses, heroines who are designed to appeal to young girls, but break the old-fashioned princess mold by actually doing things instead of looking pretty while waiting to be rescued. I love the concept. Let’s hope there’s some really good storytelling to back it up.

Bob Newhart made our hearts grow three sizes by calmly announcing that he will not perform for Rick Santorum and his anti-LGBT pals at the Legatus Summit. Sometimes these quiet moments can mean so much.

Upcoming Bob Newhart Tour Date Change — Bob will not be performing at the Legatus Summit in Orlando FL on February 6th, 2014